Moscow - Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin currently leads the candidate list in an internet poll of greatest Russians of all time, dismaying historians, reports said Tuesday.
The poll, which runs on the website www.nameofrussia.ru. till September, threatens to become a disgrace, Russian media commented.
'The people simply cannot know the truth,' the head of the Institute of Russian History, Vladimir Lavrov, told the internet newspaper website Gazeta.ru in Moscow.
Lavrov criticized the portrayal of Stalin in school text books as a hero.
Stalin, who came from Georgia, is generally regarded as the one of history's worst dictators, responsible for the mass murder of millions during his 30-year reign up to his death in 1953.
The poll has been organized by state television channel Rossiya and lists 50 candidates.
Already 1.3 million people have voted, with singer Vladimir Visocki in second place and communist revolutionary Lenin in third.
Only in Russia.
Actually the website haxed the poll so Czar Nicholas II "won" in the end.
There's a certain misconception that things were somehow better before the October Revolution in Russia. It was great if you were really rich. Everyone else lived in a dirt-floor hut and starved nine months out of the year. It says more about the pathetic nature of Russia as a country that communism was actually an improvement than does anything communism ever accomplished say about itself.
Stalin should be viewed as tied to his setting. Prior to his rule, it wasn't uncommon for millions to die in famine and war under a good old fashioned autocratic monarchy. It wasn't like communism displaced a utopian republic. Communism, which would have its peak under Stalin's reign, was just one brutal dictator replacing another.
For all of his crimes, Stalin won the Second World War. This is fact. He did this by out-brutalizing Hitler, a guy who gassed children for kicks. As we look back, do we not see the way it could have gone? What if Hitler had toppled the Soviet Union? Stalin, perhaps alone, saw the alternative and saw that it would be a fight to the death.
It's not easy to say he was a good person (because he most assuredly was not). It's easier to say, that in terms of Russia, he was the right person at the time. There are few men that have ever lived quite willing to do what he did. He brought his country out of the middle ages, turned it into an industrial force, and when called upon to do so, sacrificed millions of his countrymen to assure his nation's survival and all of this was accomplished with coercion and very personal violence.
The man was dedicated and he got his job done. In terms of Russia, he's definitely a hero. In terms of the world, probably not.
On the other hand, anyone else would have beat Hitler at a far lesser cost. But that's what you get when the military leaders are murdered and civilians take direct control of the army.
It's absolutely Horrifying that Stalin is even in the TopTen of votes.
He sent millions of people to slaughter in the wars, and some 20 million "workers" died in the Gulags, Slave Campos, and "Factories".
Czar Nicholas was already a Visionary propelling Russia into the Modern Western world with Political Reforms, Modernization of peoples lives and work, and then the Communist revolution threw almost all his accomplishments to the winds, leaving the Russian people to suffer and rebuild again, all under one of the most brutal dictatorial Regimes to ever exist.
The Greatness of Russia that Stalin took credit for, began with Czar Nicholas.
Only Chairman Mao could be considered worse than Stalin.
I agree with Vladimir Lavrov, the people just do not know the history.
Horrifying.
Under Czar Nicholas, former serfs, liberated by the government, were being forced to pay their former owners compensation. When confronted with a few protesters, he had his armies open fire on them.
He was just a dictator with a title.
Did they really have any decent choices?